“Arrested Development” movie to be preceded by 10-episode miniseason
Start your final countdown now. Read the glorious details here.
Interview: Cliff Martinez, film score composer, “Drive”
Cliff Martinez owns a piece of artwork, displayed in the entryway of his home/studio in the San Fernando Valley, that offers a glimpse into the storied past that led to his work as a film composer for current movies such as Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive.” It is the album art for Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s classic 1969 album, “Trout Mask Replica” — the one with Beefheart holding a fish head in front of his face.
On the poster, Beefheart inscribed the following: “Cliff, don’t jump. Gravity will be jealous.” Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, signed it one week before Martinez, a drummer in Los Angeles’ fertile post-punk scene, got a call to play on Beefheart’s final studio album, 1982′s “Ice Cream for Crow.”
“I pick up the phone, and I just hear, ‘What are you doin’?’ And I said, ‘I’m watching TV,’” Martinez said in a recent phone interview. Martinez said that eccentric artist behind “Lick My Decals Off, Baby” and “When Big Joan Sets Up” took a pause, then piped up again. “‘Anything good on?’” he said.
Van Vliet offered him the job. “I couldn’t have been more thrilled if I had been playing with Jimi Hendrix or Miles Davis,” Martinez said.
Nearly 30 years later, long after playing with Beefheart and serving as drummer on the first two Red Hot Chili Peppers albums, Martinez, 57, is an in-demand composer of film scores. Just this year, his work can be heard in “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Drive” and the latest film by frequent collaborator Steven Soderbergh, “Contagion.”
“For the better part of 2010, I was just catching up on my thumb-twiddling. And then all of a sudden this happened. I’ve never done three in a year, and the year’s not even over,” Martinez said. “I guess all of that time I stood by the freeway with the “Will Score for Food” sign finally paid off.”
Martinez’ work on “Drive” recalls the gleaming, robotic pulse of Tangerine Dream’s “Risky Business” score or Giorgio Moroder’s Eurodisco compositions for “Midnight Express”: atmospheric washes and kinetic bursts of dance music for night drivers. He built his score around the core songs Refn included as references on the rough cut: new tracks such as “Nightcall” by Kavinsky & Lovefoxxx, a mid-tempo dance song with a distinctly mid-1980s sound. He said he often uses keyboards with specific sounds as core instruments in his scores, but his most prized musical instrument is a Baschet Cristal, a 1952 invention that first caught Martinez’ imagination when he was in grade school.
“I saw it as a child in 1964 or ’65 at the Museum of Modern Art,” Martinez said. “The guys who built it, the two brothers, Francois and Bernard Baschet, had an exhibit of 12 instruments they created. It was just one of those things that you see as a child that just completely reupholster your brain. And I think the Beatles happened the same year on Ed Sullivan, so I think those things are what made me want to be a musician — and not just an ordinary one, but a weird musician.
“Nobody knows what it’s supposed to sound like, so everyone assumes I know what I’m doing,” he said. “It is laid out like a piano, sort of, so in a sense it’s kind of intuitive, but I can’t think of any other instrument you play with moistened fingers on glass rods.”
It was his sense of musical adventure and discovering new sound opportunities that led Martinez into film. In the mid-1980s, when the Red Hot Chili Peppers were recording their second album, “Freaky Styley” with George Clinton, Martinez bought a sampling drum machine. It had only about five seconds of sampling memory, but Martinez would record what he refers to as “rude noises” and construct percussion loops.
His experiments with the rudimentary sampler first gained attention from “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” but then Soderbergh, who was just starting his career as a filmmaker, chose Martinez to score 1989′s “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” Martinez spent the next several years scoring Soderbergh films, including “Traffic,” “Solaris” and “The Limey.”
“He said, ‘That stuff will be perfect for my next movie,’” Martinez said of his first collaboration with Soderbergh. “When I saw the movie, I said, ‘I don’t get it, Steven. This doesn’t sound like it will work at all,’ and he said, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll do something different.’”
For Martinez, that spirit of doing “something different” goes all the way back to his days in the L.A. underground. During the “Freaky Styley” sessions, Martinez said the Chili Peppers would be recording an instrumental track at Clinton’s Detroit studio that, to their ears, was fatally flawed. He said that Clinton set the young men straight.
“He said, ‘That’s not a mistake. That’s the funk,’” Martinez recalled. “That was a very Beefheartian thing to say.”
Movie Review: “Phase 7″
Rating: 72
Not everyone left to make their way in an apocalypse will have the necessary skills to survive, and as Edgar Wright proved with “Shaun of the Dead,” some of the last remaining humans might be complete dopes. With “Phase 7,” director Nicolas Goldbart introduces the world to Shaun’s inept Argentine cousin.
Much like “Shaun,” “Phase 7” (currently in midnight showings at AMC Quail Springs Mall) is a darkly comic trip down a familiar horror road: Survivors attempt to hold on after a deadly virus brings society to a standstill. At first, Coco (Daniel Hendler) and his extremely pregnant wife, Pipi (Jazmin Stuart), seem completely oblivious to what is happening around them, shopping and bickering at a Buenos Aires supermarket as frenzied fellow shoppers fill their carts in anticipation of the gathering storm. Even after the World Health Organization and Argentina’s authorities enforce a quarantine, Coco and Pipi just treat it like an annoyance. Coco seems more annoyed at the lack of Internet than he does at the possibility that he could die.
With their new apartment building shut down by the local authorities, Coco and Pipi get to know their neighbors a little too well. Guglieri and Lange (Carlos Bermejo and Abian Vainstein) are the first of the group to turn on their fellow tenants, attempting to kill the elderly Zanutto (Federico Luppi) to take his food and medicine. Coco winds up on friendly terms with Horacio (Yayo Guridi), a survivalist who was paranoid long before suspicion was needed, and the two mismatched knuckleheads soon become a united front, much to Pipi’s irritation.
While it is rarely as funny as “Shaun,” “Phase 7” is cut from the same cloth in one key respect: It illustrates how some people are not natural heroes no matter how the pressures of a catastrophe might hit them. When the world is running down, Coco amuses himself by sculpting his shaggy beard into a grotesque sideburn-handlebar mustache combo. If it weren’t for Horacio, who is obsessed with the notion that the pandemic is “Phase 7” of a plan to shape a “new world order,” Coco and Pipi might just argue themselves to death instead of defending themselves and planning for some kind of post-apocalyptic future.
Clearly working from a minimal budget, Goldbart restricts most of the action to the apartment complex as the tenants’ worst impulses come to the fore. As order breaks down, the body count climbs in the building thanks to an unexpected aggressor’s uncommon shotgun skills, and Goldbart spares nothing when it comes to gore and carnage. “Phase 7” does not redefine its genre, but it provides a goofy counterpoint to Stephen King’s “The Stand,” showing that the slack and incompetent could inherit the Earth.
— Lang
Home Video: “The Company Men”
Rating: 85
John Wells’ “The Company Men” details what happens when the Boston-based shipping conglomerate GTX misses its quarterly projections and starts handing out walking papers in an attempt to meet the stock price demanded by its shareholders. The film follows three men at distinct career stages who all met inglorious ends at the hands of hard-line CEO James Salinger (Craig T. Nelson): Chief Operating Officer Gene McCrory (Tommy Lee Jones), middle manager Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) and hotshot sales executive Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck).
Unquestionably a film of its time, “The Company Men” deftly portrays the dangers of an employee having too much of his or her self-worth wrapped up in a job: Phil worked his way up from the docks to the white-collar office, and in his late 50s, he’s ill-suited for restarting or reinventing himself. Gene had a surplus of cash on hand but squandered too much on his materialistic wife (Patricia Kalember) and his human resources director/mistress (Maria Bello), so his golden parachute feels like fool’s gold, and Bobby is forced to sell his Porsche, sell the house he shares with his supportive spouse (Rosemarie DeWitt) and kids, and exercise some career options he never imagined.
Wells produced “ER” for 15 years on NBC before moving to cable with Showtime’s “Shameless” and HBO’s “Mildred Pierce.” He got the bum’s rush from his former network when NBC deemed Wells’ cop drama “Southland” too expensive for the return it was getting and abruptly canceled the series on the eve of its second season. But like at least some of the GTX men, Wells, who offers an interesting audio commentary on the DVD, found a way to restart, moving “Southland” to TNT and committing to networks with fewer strings attached. An understanding of that background gives “The Company Men” even more resonance. Through the film, Wells is saying there are ways to move on if the worst-case career scenario comes into play.
— Lang
Blu-ray Review: “The Lincoln Lawyer”
Rating: 73
If the producers of “The Lincoln Lawyer” are not currently developing a series for FX or TNT, something is dangerously out of balance in Hollywood, because Mickey Haller, the fallen lawyer working his way back to respectability and keeping an office in the back seat of a chauffeured Lincoln Continental, is ripe for episodic treatment. As played by Matthew McConaughey, Mickey is shrewd, knows how to artfully cut corners when mounting a defense and, in this story based on Michael Connelly’s novel, he needs to know how to get out from under a bad client.
That client is Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), a Los Angeles real estate wunderkind who gets popped for assaulting a woman he picked up at a club. At first, Louis’ arrest looks like a frame-up, but then Mickey begins seeing parallels between this case and a former client (Michael Pena), and soon the defense becomes complicated by new, unsavory evidence.
Directed with workmanlike steadiness by Brad Furman, “The Lincoln Lawyer” feels like a corrective measure for McConaughey, who at one time seemed positioned to become the next Paul Newman but faltered with too many romantic comedies and too few meaty roles. He is strong here and finds some good chemistry with Marisa Tomei (as his district attorney ex-wife), and there is a sense throughout “The Lincoln Lawyer” that McConaughey is back on track with this performance, committed instead of lazing through another throwaway project. Connelly has featured Mickey Haller in four novels since 2005, and the concept is rock-solid. McConaughey might not be ready to move to television, but someone needs to put wheels under a “Lincoln Lawyer” TV adaptation.
EXTRAS: Multiple featurettes on the Blu-ray, including an interesting one-on-one discussion between Connelly and McConaughey.
– Lang
Adrianne Palicki: A Real American Hero? — A Nerdage/StaticBlog Sweeps Month Crossover Special on the “GI Joe” sequel
Nerdage: So, the first GI Joe movie was, to put it kindly, a bit of a mess. Casting announcements for the sequel, thus far, have been a mix of “huh” and “hmmm”…. RZA may play the Blind Master. DJ Cotrona likely to play Flint. Channing Tatum and Ray Park set to return as Duke and Snake Eyes. Elodie Yung signed as Jinx. John Chu set to direct. The Rock expected to play Roadblock. Bruce Willis keeps being rumored. And this weekend, the news that may cause Staticblog’s George Lang to see a GI Joe movie: Adrianne Palicki, Deadline reports, will play Lady Jaye.
What do you think, Lang? Are you buying tickets for a Dwayne Johnson/Bruce Willis film based on 3 3/4 inch action figures?
StaticBlog: Actually, if it were based on the 12-inch Vietnam-era guy with the awesome bristle-cut hair and beard combo, I’d be in, because Kung-Fu Grip is freaking insurmountable in plastic hand-to-hand combat.
But because this is the “Real American Hero”-era Joe, I’m basically in for the reason you surmised — Palicki, Palicki, Palicki. They can have the guy who directed the last two “Step Up” time-wasters and “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” at the helm, and yet they have Palicki, so everything’s going to be just fine.
Adrianne Palicki was, without a doubt, one of the best things about the first three seasons of “Friday Night Lights,” and as NBC viewers will certainly enjoy this Friday, her character, Tyra Collette, returns for the final two episodes of the series. She got a ton of bad press this spring when early costume photos from David E. Kelley’s “Wonder Woman” were given a trial balloon treatment by NBC and failed miserably in Internet comments sections everywhere. My personal view is that Palicki, standing nearly 6 feet tall with a distinctive beauty, was perfect for the role, but Kelley wasn’t the right guy. Joss Whedon was always the best choice.
Palicki also got seriously screwed over when “Lone Star,” the best reviewed pilot of the 2010 television season, got dropped by hair-trigger cancellation champion Fox after two episodes. Considering that “Friday Night Lights” is one of the best dramas of the past 10 years but never was a ratings success, Palicki could stand a break — even from a clankety-clank monstrosity. Having her involved suddenly makes the thing interesting.
Nerdage: Tangentally, the rumor mill has it that Bruce Willis may be intended to play the original “GI Joe,” though I don’t know if Bruce is likely to rock the bristle-cut and beard… The character made, I believe, only one appearance in the Larry Hama comics and didn’t, as far as I know, appear on the TV show.
I, of course, enjoyed the original Larry Hama comics as a kid, and heard he consulted on the first film. Still, I found that movie mostly a confusing mess, though it was filled with attractive people. Will John Chu have better luck than Stephen Sommers?
StaticBlog: OK, so I understand how Sommers got from the first two “Mummy” movies to “GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” but how does Jon Chu parlay the “Step Up” movies, which are essentially “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” with electro-pop and slightly larger budgets, much less the Bieber hagiography, into “GI Joe 2: Cobra Strikes”? He must know how to follow a budget and make money or something.
Nerdage: Chu told The Deadbolt that he’s a big fan of GI Joe from back in the day, played with the toys, had the comic and everything, so maybe he’ll make a movie the fans of the property want to see. Here’s hoping, anyway.
StaticBlog: At least there’s Palicki.
Palicki, Palicki, Palicki.
deadCENTER: TrollHunter
TROLL!!!!!
Usually a term for people on the internet with no life, but this time around it’s just a really fun movie.
TrollHunter is a Norwegian made movie that begins with a group of college students trying to capture a story about bear killings. They end up following Hans, whom they believe to be a bear poacher, as he makes his way deep into a Norwegian forest and it’s there that they discover a 30-foot troll with an insatiable desire to eat Christians… seriously.
The movie goes on to reveal that Trolls have been kept quiet by the Norwegian government for years and when an accident happens because of a troll, the government usually places the blame on bears. (Makes sense)
The entire film is shot like a found footage documentary, where there are odd breaks and violent shakes and the camera is more often missing the action instead of lining up perfect shot. But unlike movies like Cloverfield, Quarantined and even the Blair Witch Project, TrollHunter makes the experience enjoyable and not as frantic as the others.
TrollHunter was a true highlight for me at deadCENTER as it was the final film I saw and it gave the entire festival, which was perhaps at its best in its 11-year history, a very satisfying ending.
-Adam Kemp
deadCENTER: Page One: Inside The New York Times
Maybe it’s the journalism geek inside of me, but the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times was without a doubt the film I was looking forward to the most at deadCENTER this year.
Director Andrew Rossi spent nearly 14 months inside one of the biggest media outlets in the country and the insight he brings back on how the Times are changing to adapt to a news “right now” society is pretty fascinating.
The main “characters” of the film are social media expert and all around boy wonder Brian Stelter and the gruff but the amazingly quick-witted and hilariously blunt David Carr.
Page One addresses the main concern of falling ad revenues to the rising cost of printing a newspaper to the innumerable amounts of competition that those newspapers face from online sites.
Rossi’s ability to take a very niche and complex kind of subject like the decline of print newspapers and explain it so neatly is an understated quality.
-Adam Kemp
DVD Review: “Daydream Nation”
Rating: 65
In “Daydream Nation,” the concept of a teenage wasteland is taken to its logical extreme as Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings) faces relocation to an awful, insular town where all the teens are stoned on either pot or household cleansers, a pile of burning tires spews benzene into the air and, just to top things off, a serial killer is on the loose. Caroline hates the place, partly because it feels like the end of the world (a recurring motif in writer-director Mike Goldbach’s script), but mostly because there’s nothing to do while the world ends.
This boredom inspires Caroline to seduce her English teacher, Barry Anderson (Josh Lucas), a 30-something failed novelist with anger and attachment issues, while shy and depressed teen Thurston (Reece Thompson) pines for her. Caroline is smart and literate with witticisms at the ready, but she is surrounded by tragedy in a town where the police post curfew signs telling the citizenry to travel in pairs. She has the skills to survive, but her behavior is wreaking its own havoc.
Despite a character named Thurston and a title purloined from Sonic Youth’s landmark 1988 album, “Daydream Nation” has nothing to do with Thurston Moore or Sonic Youth, unless the “Teen Age Riot” at a classmate’s party counts. “Daydream Nation” features solid work from Lucas and especially Thompson (“Rocket Science”), but Dennings, who currently appears in “Thor,” carries the film as it veers from “Reality Bites” ennui into more ominous “Donnie Darko” territory. While it’s possible to get momentarily absorbed in the gathering gloom, “Daydream Nation” is only a minor nightmare.
— Lang
DVD Review: “American: The Bill Hicks Story”
Rating: 84
Patton Oswalt, Louie C.K. and David Cross all have some of Bill Hicks’ creative DNA coursing through their standup routines — the current rise of alt-minded comics could not exist without Hick’s brilliant, messy and sadly incomplete life and career. With “American: The Bill Hicks Story,” directors Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas assemble a fast-paced and personal look at Hicks, who died from pancreatic cancer in 1994 at age 32, and thanks to the vivid recollections of his family, friends and fellow comics, “American” cuts through the legend-making of the past few years to show the boy he was and the truth-teller he became.
Thomas and Harlock employ cut-and-paste animation to illustrate Hicks’ rise, emphasizing his late-1970s beginnings as the teen wunderkind of the Houston comedy scene, when he and childhood friend Dwight Slade perfected their timing through sketch comedy before moving to the standup stage. “American” follows Hicks as the formerly straight-laced boy becomes too enthusiastic about alcohol and drugs, then goes completely sober in the late-1980s and finds his voice as a confrontational, darkly funny social critic.
Because it restricts its remembrances and appreciations to those who knew him well, “American” has more weight and resonance — the directors could have talked to those who inherited his mantle in the modern standup milieu, but the results would feel more commonplace, like a VH1 special. If “American” has a weak spot, it is the relative lack of great Hicks material. To see the man at his best, watch the standup specials “Sane Man,” “Relentless” and “Revelations,” but “American: The Bill Hicks Story” offers insight into how he got to those high points and why he still casts a long shadow.
– Lang
